Meet the Team

Cisco’s AI and Software Platform Group is building the next generation of intelligent, cloud-native platforms that power Cisco products, services, and customer experiences. We are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and development of foundational data services and data platform capabilities at enterprise scale.

This role is ideal for a systems thinker and technical leader who is passionate about building reliable, secure, highly scalable data infrastructure. You will define platform strategy, solve complex distributed-systems challenges, and guide multiple engineering teams in delivering data products that support analytics, automation, and AI/ML workloads.

Your Impact

• Strategic Vision & Engineering Leadership Define and drive the multi-year technical roadmap for data services. Influence engineering strategy, provide architectural guidance to leadership, and represent the organization in technical reviews to ensure alignment across teams.

• Platform Architecture & Design Design and build highly available, scalable, and resilient data systems. Establish reusable primitives and robust architectural patterns for ingestion, processing, storage, and delivery, supporting everything from batch to real-time event-driven workflows.

• Data Governance & Quality Ensure the delivery of trusted, discoverable, and high-quality data. Define standards for data products, schemas, lineage, and contracts to empower analytics, observability, and generative AI applications.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration & Mentorship Partner with product, security, infrastructure, and AI/ML stakeholders to translate business requirements into durable solutions. Drive technical excellence by resolving complex scaling challenges and mentoring senior engineering staff to raise team standards.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

• 15+ years of experience designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems or data platforms.

• Experience in data services, cloud platforms, distributed storage, data processing, and service-oriented architectures.

• Programming experience in one or more languages such as Java, Go, Python, or C++.

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive experience building and scaling multi-tenant SaaS or enterprise data platforms from early-stage design to global production. Proficiency with a modern data stack, including Kubernetes, Kafka, Flink, Spark, object storage, lakehouse architectures, and distributed SQL engines.

• Proven ability to support modern AI/ML workloads, including experience with feature stores, vector/unstructured data, model evaluation, and generative AI systems.

• Deep understanding of the data lifecycle, with practical experience implementing robust frameworks for governance, data quality, lineage, cataloging, security, privacy, and regulatory compliance.

• Demonstrated ability to work effectively across geographically distributed teams. A strong record of industry influence, which may include contributions to open-source projects, technical publications, patents, or established industry standards.

Why Cisco?

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.

Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

The starting salary range posted for this position is $296,300.00 to $374,800.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.

U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.

U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies:

• 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees

• 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco

• Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees

• Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)

• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next

• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members

• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer

For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.

Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:

• .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;

• 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;

• 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and

• Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.

For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.

The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:

New York City Metro Area:

$296,300.00 - $431,000.00

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

$263,700.00 - $383,500.00

* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.

** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.